CF Verdie 3
Dearest Addie, Well, you must be home again by now. I hope Mama feels better under your loving attention. Is your new violin making the same sweet music as your old? I am sure you will grow more comfortable with it, in time. I myself seem set on exploring the world with my new employers and am sending you this tiny painting of one of the little villages we passed through that I bought from a strange lady Gypsy. She offered to tell my fortune, and perhaps I should have accepted the offer because curious things have fallen into my life since I started my employment. I am not sure if it is simply mischance or if I have fallen under a Gypsy curse. Do you remember my old dream, of meeting a dwarf engineer and learning from him? I have met one but I could not understand him! Perhaps I am too stupid to learn from his explanations. We met him when the airship had a strange accident in the desert, but fear not – no one was injured, and I believe I was not at fault for it, so my employment is still safe. The dwarf we encountered was enamored of a scantily-clad lady in an oasis there, and was building her a machine which could somehow pull water from the very air! But, try as I might to follow his explanation, it served me little, full as it was of “fulluginating hinges” and “maltrose wires” and “tributary gears”. Perhaps dwarf machines are that different, although I suspect his own gears may have needed either a little more or a little less oil. And sadly, to escape the trap we were in, I had to break his creation. Poor man, he was despondent and my lady employer, Miss Who… well, eventually we loaded him aboard the airship, with this desiccated dead rat which was his “comfort in the wilderness and the balm to his weary soul”. I forget the exact lines or poet. As little as we liked to bring the sad thing along, it did seem to bring him comfort. I sleep uneasily these nights when we have landed the airship and set up a rough camp. Last night, I woke to find rough dwarfish hands digging in my tool bag and heard a voice, giggling and saying, “must be quiet Cogsworth, silent as thunderstorm, yes, she will never know about us borrowing her tools, good Cogsworth, there will be some cheese in it for you if we are silent as a lion, brave, sneaky Cogsworth, clever, quiet Cogsworth …” and so on (Cogsworth being the name of the dwarf’s rat). After a confrontation that I hesitate to divulge during which poor Cogsworth was thrown about more than a dead rat should be, the dwarf grumpily said that “poor Cogsworth is getting old and not getting around as well as he used to, poor lively Cogsworth, so Cogsworth wants a little machine to help him scamper about.” I admit my lingering hope that I might learn something from the dwarf made me help him accomplish something I might have, in my wiser moments, let alone. I am not sure what my employers will think of this when they discover it, and I have hopes they may not since we leave the dwarf and his mechanical rat in the next large village was come across. The other development is a happier circumstance. I have written to the gentleman who is funding this expedition, and begged of him the wherewithal to rebuild the airship as a ship to go under the sea as easily as it moves through the clouds. I still have a few mechanical problems to solve but I am hopeful that I will find the solutions in some engineering journal somewhere, the main one being that generating enough steam to propel my invention would result in our suffocation. A minor problem, to be sure, and I will start my modifications once I get the nod from him, as I surely will. He must see how much better his machine will be once I am finished my labors. That is, assuming we survive the maiden voyage. My flickering torch reminds me of my bed and so I end this with my best love to you and Mama. Verdie (OOC: Verdie is trying to raise Sorcerous Engineering from average to average+)